Husserl Stud (2009) 25:169–175 DOI 10.1007/s10743-009-9056-8 Steinbock, Anthony J. Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 328 pp. Cloth $44.95 James G. Hart Published online: 13 February 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 This fine book by Anthony Steinbock (hereafter AS) is centered on the theme of verticality; it is also, as the back of the book’s jacket says, ‘‘a phenomenological view of religious experience based on mysticism.’’ It is commendably ambitious. This ambition generates a philosophy centered in mysticism as it is phenomenologically explicated by AS. But at the same time it is a philosophy of religion and religious philosophy that, along the way, is a philosophy of the person and a critique of secularist culture. I find such extraordinary spiritual kinship with the intention and concerns of the book that any review satisfactory to this reviewer would require much more space that I am allotted here. 1 Presentation and Givenness Let us grant AS’s position that appresentations, emotions, the Er- and Durchleben aller Erlebnisse, as well as all the basic passivities prior to one’s ‘‘I-can,’’ afford a kind of ‘‘givenness’’ which does not fit into the act-object, noesis-noema, schema whereby we make present spatial-temporal or ideal objects. Let us further grant that in non-reflective self-awareness, where the manifested and manifestation are the same, there is a coincidence of the genitive and dative of manifestation, i.e., a presentation of… to—. Granting all this we may ask: Do such concessions warrant dispensing with the intentional noetic-noematic analysis for our dealing with Others and God, and specifically, are such phenomenological themes irrelevant for explicating vertical and mystic experience? More specifically, do not the interplay of presence and absence, filled and empty, as well as the correlation of a dative and genitive of manifestation have an important role in elucidating the abundant images J. G. Hart (&) Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Sycamore Hall 230, Bloomington, IN 47405-7005, USA e-mail: hart@indiana.edu 123 170 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:169–175 employed by the three mystics AS studies, i.e., the Christian, St. Teresa of Avila, the Jew, Rabbi Dov Baer, and the Muslim, Rūzbihān Baqlı̄? 2 Verticality and Epiphany AS makes an original move by inserting the phenomenology of verticality as an essential consideration for philosophy. What AS has in mind is to be contrasted with the ‘‘horizontal’’ realm of experience as what is in principle within our grasp. The vertical, by contrast, is not within reach, not graspable and controllable. For AS the personal is the realm that exemplarily has to do with verticality. This reader wanted to see more clearly elaborated how ‘‘verticality permeates all existence,’’ foremost the personal.1 What is called for is not alluding to, or mentioning, but elaborating the logic of the topological-kinaesthetic axiological symbolism of the insurmountably distant ‘‘there’’ that cannot become ‘‘here,’’ the heavenly and earthly, the light and the heavy, the elevating and degrading or base, the allure of the excellent, exalted and superior in contrast to the lowly and inferior. Similarly, the exemplary verticality manifest in the presence of the Other begs to be made evident in showing how the Other addresses us from a unique, insurmountable distance and ineliminable authority as the source of all obligations, claims, demands, and exhortations. This is all implicit in AS’s specification of verticality as what is unpredictable, dangerous, spontaneous and undomesticable, as well as what takes us beyond ourselves and incites awe. It has to do with the ‘‘absolute’’ by which AS means what is ‘‘so unique that it can be predicated neither of singularity nor plurality,’’ i.e., it has to do not with something particular, nor with unities of particulars, nor with something that is an instance of a kind, nor with kinds or universals (pp. 14–15). For AS this is exemplarily fulfilled in the inter-personal, as Chap. 7 makes clear, because of the uniqueness of persons. The ‘‘religious’’ has to do with the vertical dimension of the inter-personal, i.e., the relation of finite persons to the Absolute Person; this he calls the Holy. Why and how ‘‘the Holy’’ is ascribed to the vertical, religious, and absolute dimension for AS never clearly emerges for this reader, even though, at the same time, the reader has little doubt AS could make this connection. Perhaps this mode of givenness would require an eidetics of the holy, i.e., a slide into the ‘‘presentational,’’ which AS eschews. AS names ‘‘epiphany’’ that ‘‘mode of givenness that qualifies a dimension of experiencing as religious’’ (p. 15). The Abrahamic tradition is exemplarily this 1 I apologize if I have failed to take account of any other relevant writings of AS wherein he has explicitly undertaken the eidetics of verticality. He mentions (pp. 12–14) but does not use the discussions in Bachelard, Erwin Straus, and Merleau-Ponty. Discussions by Husserl and Heidegger of the earthly and heavenly are only obliquely alluded to. I would note that Conrad-Martius explored this theme. Mircea Eliade, the historian and philosopher of religion had much to say about the ‘‘ascension’’ and ‘‘resurrection’’ motifs in the religions of the world as ciphers for our being in the world. The literature on this theme is abundant, but I especially recommend a remarkable discussion by an early student of Husserl, Hans Voss (Voss 1940). My point is not that AS does not show familiarity with literature that I think is important, but rather that this wonderful central theme of his book is simply not given the robust display it merits. 123 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:169–175 171 absolute mode of the inter-personal, in contrast, e.g., to Buddhism. Epiphany takes place foremost in the non-presentational givenness proper to the infinite loving between the divine infinite person and the finite person. Yet, a reader may ask, may it not be said that ‘‘love’’ typically is not the way one relates to the holy as the mysterium tremendum—at least not without a further elaborate theological narrative? ‘‘Love’’ is said to be ‘‘essentially a free self-giving that is unconditional’’ (p. 161) to what is of infinite intrinsic value, the infinite person. But have we not resolved to adhere to a ‘‘givenness’’ which is not burdened by the noesis-noema structure? Love, after all, is self-giving; that is, an intentional display of ‘‘something,’’ the infinite person, that has intrinsic value. 3 Mysticism in the Service of Phenomenology AS devotes a chapter to each of the three mystics whom he chooses to represent the ‘‘Abrahamic traditions.’’ For AS it is important to see (the eidetic features) first that the Holy is not given like a thing that is partially given in experience, but rather it is given fully, i.e., without hidden aspects, yet in such a way that it is not given exhaustively, but only superabundantly. (Does this mean that there is still an ‘‘empty intention’’?) Secondly, it is ‘‘received’’ and is nothing I accomplish or can redo or re-presence at will (pp. 139–140). AS uses these mystic texts to elucidate (problematically for this reviewer) both a ‘‘phenomenology of mysticism’’ as well as, ultimately, a general philosophy. Consider other problematic areas of what Husserl called the work of a ‘‘reconstructive phenomenology,’’ e.g., of insanity, of infancy, of animal consciousness, of paranormal experience, etc. Here we seek to understand kinds of experiences of Others that we phenomenologists ourselves typically cannot have first-personally. These are problematic because phenomenological display privileges first-person access to the matter being explicated, and the writer/speaker presupposes that the reader/listener has equal first-person access to the matter in question. The ‘‘givenness,’’ whether of the eschewed ‘‘presentational’’ form or the forms which AS deems more appropriate for his purposes, is thus always also firstpersonally evident to the reader/listener. In contrast to proper phenomenological analysis, the mystical experiences, like the appresented forms of experience requiring ‘‘reconstruction,’’ are not available first-personally to the typical phenomenologist or the reader/listener—regardless of their apodicticity and necessity for the mystic—but are only present for the listener/ reader either as a report of what is present in an empty third-personal intention or they are present, like a poem, as having the power to evoke analogous approximate first-personal filled experiences in the reader/listener. AS’s appeal (p. 34) to Merleau-Ponty’s description of the ‘‘phantom-limb’’ is telling. We who have not had this dreadful experience are not asked to attend to this experience first-personally, but rather through a second- or third-person report are required to imagine what it would be like to not have a limb and yet to have experiences that seem for such a victim to be the same as those one would have if one had the appropriate member. We can appropriate this report as an empirical fact 123 172 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:169–175 (not a datum of phenomenological reflection). But suppose we were asked to regard this experience as exemplary for all bodily experiences. This proposal gets close to AS’s claim that the experiences which we do not have and the mystic does have are revelatory of what exemplary human experience most fundamentally is. In this bold claim I think AS is right for theological reasons, but I think such a view is unwarranted for phenomenological philosophy. Furthermore, unless reading the mystic evokes in me analogous first-personal experiences or perhaps occasions a rich eidetic thought-experiment that stretches my senses of necessity, or awakens in me leibhaftig my lived sense of verticality, the mystical experience is meaningful only at a distance for the phenomenologist, i.e., through a speculative reconstruction. But such is not properly transcendental phenomenological eidetic analysis. AS ably defends mystical experience from the reduction to pathology and holds that it, like any mode of experiencing, qua lived experiencing, has its own legitimacy. He shows that mystics are explicitly aware of possible self-deception and yet often lay claim to an apodictic evidence for a goodness too good not to be true (cf. Chap. 5). He could, with William James, point out that mystical experience has resulted in some of the most noble specimens of humanity. All this, however, does not suffice to make it a ‘‘givenness’’ of phenomenology proper. AS sees (at e.g., p. 32ff.) the foil position the reviewer here espouses in this review but rejects it for reasons of a ‘‘generative’’ phenomenology. 4 Modernism and Generative Phenomenology AS’s critique of modernism is tied to his view of ‘‘generative phenomenology,’’ which he developed in his Home and Beyond: Generativity After Husserl. In the present book (p. 33ff.), this refers both to the ‘‘non-presentational’’ modes of ‘‘givenness’’ preferred here by AS, as well as to the thesis that the ‘‘Myself’’ or ipseity is constituted or generated in what is not personally given but rather by what is absent and beyond itself, e.g., in the Other, whether the finite or infinite person. ‘‘Modernity’’ in contrast is foremost the view that self is self-grounding. It misses the ‘‘generative moment that is the inter-personal nexus.’’ In AS’s view, a phenomenology that stays occupied with what presents itself on the basis of the actualization of constitutive acts, and that sees the self as ‘‘absolute’’ in the sense that its phenomenological evidence needs nothing else beyond itself, is modern and misses the generative moment. For this book, it misses the Holy and the failure to see what the mystic sees, namely that one is always already engaged in ‘‘vertical givenness,’’ that selves are bonded to and by God’s initiating creative love. How is it that we become modern and how is it that we forget our origination in the infinite divine person? AS proposes we may take clues from Heideggerian poetic thinking and through the data of mysticism recover from our forgetfulness and find a way out of modernity’s impasse of secularism and idolatry. Yet it seems to this reviewer we typically turn to this peculiar body of literature called ‘‘mystical’’ because of the teachings of one’s faith, the thematization of which is conspicuously absent in this book. The theme of the grace of faith, as the 123 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:169–175 173 unique darkness by which, with love, one is liberated from all vestiges of selfishness (at pp. 163–164 this darkness of faith is named a mystical experience), and by which one has access to the otherwise inaccessible light of religious mystery, traditionally is contrasted with mystic experience. For AS religious life is founded in mystic-vertical experience. It is not clear whether AS founds faith in such experience, or whether faith is identified with such experience, or whether faith is a fundamentalist ‘‘substitute for epiphany’’ (p. 237; cf. also the reference to ‘‘mere faith’’ at p. 232). Yet AS raises (implicitly) the important question whether the traditional removal of faith from presentational perceptual experience (Hebrews 11:1) is the equivalent of removing it from a nonpresentational experience of verticality. Typically for the Christian mystics, as well as the exemplary Abraham, the kinds of filled and ecstatic ‘‘givenness’’ of mystic experience are neither the norm nor superior to the life of faith that is bereft of these extraordinary experiences, i.e., they are not superior to a loving trusting assent to the hoped-for that is experientially-presentationally absent. AS juxtaposes his position to a modernist one. But because of the obscurity of his stand on faith he appears to be a modernist in two senses. First, the book seems to offer as philosophical some positions that are dependent on the acceptance of theological or revealed teachings, but these positions accessed by faith are surreptitiously introduced as philosophical and not acknowledged as doctrines of faith.2 Second, and here less importantly and more pardonable because of the tangle of obscure and difficult issues, his founding religious life on non-cognitive experiences is what was called in nineteenth century theological, especially Roman Catholic, circles, ‘‘modernist.’’3 To the extent that verticality is ineluctable and essential for humans—and I take this to be AS’s point of departure—verticality can well be a calling to be an Übermensch. In which case the relationship to the Absolute Spirit is not one of piety. Or if verticality is named ‘‘divine graciousness’’ and at the same time deemed essential and necessary for humans, then it is not grace but ontological-essential necessity. This again raises questions about the nature of the metaphysical piety to which AS is inviting us. Yet, for this reviewer, raising the question whether the non-presentational experience of verticality is essential to religion, and seemingly to faith, is one of the major contributions of this book. I rejoice in AS’s highlighting (in Chap. 7 ‘‘On Individuation’’) that a core aspect of the person is to be regarded as uniquely unique, and in emphasizing that this is not comparable to being a particular or an instantiation of a kind. Yet it is essential to his generative phenomenology to hold that the ‘‘Myself’’ is as a person individuated by becoming, indeed by taking up one’s personal becoming (which for him is answering one’s calling by the Infinite Person). 2 For this sense of modernism see Prufer (1993, pp. 66–71), Sokolowski (1993, pp. 179–193), and Sokolowski (1995, p. 22). 3 A philosopher who mightily wrestled with these matters and around whom controversy gathered was Maurice Blondel. In Protestantism, the issue surfaced with eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal theology and in the twentieth century with Karl Barth’s concerns regarding existential-hermeneutical‘‘natural’’ theology. For a magisterial discussion, albeit one attuned primarily to Catholic theology, see Aubert (1952). 123 174 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:169–175 But is there not an important sense in which I am always necessarily myself and do not become myself, a sense in which I am an ‘‘individual’’ (I myself) not by any process of individuation? And is this sense of Myself not to be distinguished from oneself as a person, who is indeed individuated through all the givens of society, interpersonal relations, culture, biology, etc., and who becomes a unique moral identifiable person by taking one’s personal calling upon him- herself as her own task? But, we may ask, is it inconceivable that there be an ontological clone of oneself as a person having such and such properties, while it not be possible that there be a clone of Myself (cf. p. 176)?4 For AS it is important to see that the Myself enjoys an original givenness bestowed by the infinite divine creative person. For AS this original Myself subsisting in God is curiously experiencing but unexperienceable because bereft of ‘‘mineness.’’5 Here perhaps we have a case where the Pauline statement is fulfilled: ‘‘I shall know even as I have been known’’ (1 Cor. 13:12), except we must cross out at least the first proleptic ‘‘I’’ and replace it with ‘‘X-experiencing,’’ i.e., ‘‘anyone whatsoever or no one in particular shall know and this as such is how the ‘one’ knowing is being known.’’ 4 In the wake of Sydney Shoemaker, H.-N. Castañeda, et alii we may say that we are non-ascriptively, non-identifyingly aware of ourselves in non-reflective self-awareness as well as in the use of the indexical ‘‘I.’’ Ceteris paribus something analogous may be said for our knowing of Others, i.e., we know them too both non-ascriptively and ascriptively. What we refer non-ascriptively to—i.e., what we refer to without assigning properties and without making use of any third-personal non-indexical term—we may say is ‘‘present’’ non-sortally. Spaemann (1996) has made a good case for this aspect of ‘‘persons’’ in arguing that ‘‘person’’ is a non-sortal term. Thus we may hold that although persons might be identifiably the same in second- and third-personal reference because of identical ascriptions or sortal terms, what these apparent ontological twins refer to non-ascriptively, and first-personally experience when they experience themselves and one another, is an essential non-sortal unique essence and identity. For an extensive discussion of many of the phenomenological and theological-religious themes close to the heart of AS, see Hart (forthcoming). 5 AS refers to Dan Zahavi’s claim, that for the rudimentary sense of self at the pre-reflexive level there is ‘‘no explicit awareness of the experience being mine’’ (p. 173ff.). At the pre-reflexive or non-reflexive level there is no explicit awareness of anything as anything. But what is important in transcendental phenomenology is that at the level of explicit reflexive awareness there is a recognition that what we make present is precisely what was pre-reflexively or non-reflexively lived, i.e., that this is present as the same as what one lived or ‘‘experienced’’ first-personally prior to reflection. ‘‘Mineness’’ is a way of stating precisely this point, that the reflected-on and the reflecting belong to the same stream of consciousness. Mineness is thus always part of one’s self-experiencing. To absolutely eliminate it would seem to obliterate the kind of inter-personal relation AS wants to sustain between the infinite and finite persons. Yet AS is keen not only to eliminate the selfishness of the I, self, or person, but to say of the mystic experience, it is ‘‘not ‘mine,’ though there is an experience. Or again, the experience of ‘mineness’ is so transformed as to make it meaningless to speak of a self in this instance’’ (p. 176). But to eliminate ‘‘mineness’’ or first-personal experiencing obliterates any sense in which the Myself experientially, nonreflectively, first-personally, subsists in the divine essence, because a lived experience that is not firstpersonal is an Unding. Further, with the elimination of the ‘‘mineness’’ of AS, someone else rather than AS might just as well be subsisting in the divine essence and be ‘‘related’’ to, or subsisting in, the divine person. 123 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:169–175 175 References Aubert, R. (1952). La proble´me de l’act de foi. Louvain: E. Warny. Hart, J. G. (forthcoming). Who one is: A transcendental-existential phenomenology, Books 1–2. Dordrecht: Springer. Prufer, T. (1993). Recapitualations. The Catholic University of America: Washington DC. Sokolowski, R. (1993). Eucharistic presence. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America. Sokolowski, R. (1995). The God of faith and reason. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America. Spaemann, R. (1996). Personen. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Voss, H. (1940). Transcendenz und Raumanschauung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. 123
